Apple Pay was slow to gain adoption among the big banks in Australia, but now the final of the “big four banks” has announced support for Apple’s platform. Westpac, the second largest bank in Australia, says that it will soon start rolling out Apple Pay support to customers.
In an announcement today, Westpac said that Apple Pay is now available at its St George, BankSA and Bank of Melbourne brands for customers with an eligible Visa debit or credit card. The decision to roll out Apple Pay to regional brands first gives Westpac time to update its technology before a national release, one executive said (via The Sydney Morning Herald.)
“We want to assure Westpac customers we are working to bring them Apple Pay as quickly as possible, while we roll-out the technology across our different banking platforms,” said the chief executive of consumer banking, David Lindberg said.
Westpac currently predicts that its customers will have access to Apple Pay by June of 2020. Of course, that could change for better or for worse, depending on the technology infrastructure. Westpac is notoriously slow to modernize, and that could end up further plaguing its roll out of Apple Pay.
The big banks in Australia have sparred with Apple over access to the iPhone’s NFC hardware. The banks petitioned that Apple open access to NFC technology so they could run their own payment platforms, but Apple denied those requests.
ANZ was the first of the big four banks in Australia to adopt Apple Pay, followed by CommBank and NAB earlier this year. Now that Westpac has committed to adding support sometime in 2020, the rollout among the big four banks in Australia is nearly complete.
For the full list of banks around the world that support Apple Pay, visit Apple’s support page here. Are you a loyal Westpac customer who has been holding out for Apple Pay support? Let us know down in the comments!
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